The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.
—Mark Twain
I think all people would like to feel that they’re a necessary part of life. That they’re necessary in the world, and that life would be poorer if they weren’t in it. When you accomplish something, when you write good poetry, then I think you feel that the world would be slightly different if you weren’t in it. And that, I think, is part of what being needed is about.
—Kenneth Koch
Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life—think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success.
—Swami Vivekananda
As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life—so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
—Matt Cartmill
In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.
—George Orwell
Most of us continue to work for wages in a highly unequal social system that denies us meaningful work and a decent return for our labor. That simple fact defines a set of common interests of immense democratic potential.
—Charles Bergquist
If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
—Albert Camus
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
—Steven Weinberg
My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?
—Charles M. Schulz
Think of a word as a pendulum instead of a fixed entity. A word can sweep by your ear and by its very sound suggest hidden meanings, preconscious associations. Listen to these words: blood, tranquil, democracy. You know what they mean literally but you have associations with those words that are cultural, as well as your own personal associations.
—Rita Mae Brown
The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
—Henry David Thoreau
I don't care why you came into my life, only that you did. I don't remember all the things I did wrong, I remember what I did right. I remember you. You made my life meaningful. You made my life special.
—Becca Fitzpatrick in Crescendo
The sea has neither meaning nor pity.
—Anton Chekhov
Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.
—Miguel de Unamuno
Man—a being in search of meaning.
—Plato